The Last Professor - Stanley Fish Blog - NYTimes.com
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/

discussion on the changing attitiudes of higher learning

In previous columns and in a recent book I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects [sic] in the world.

The sad truth is acadaemia is now a pragmatic, utilitarian enterprise, populated by those who measure and observe and produce - but there once was a place where learning meant inquiry, explanation and understanding.

Very clever, useful and informative infographic of the US Air 1549 Plane Crash into the Hudson River in New York City.

Great NYT interactive infographic style overview of the US Airways crash on the Hudson River.

I'm a bit late on this, but it's yet another fantastic interactive graphic from the New York Times showing the water landing of flight 1549.

Informative interactive feature

newsprint isn't just expensive and inefficient; it's laughably so.

I'm glad I'm not an old skool newspaper

The expense and waste of daily newspapers is probably one of the few things that make me froth with rage.

"Not that it's anything we think the New York Times Company should do, but we thought it was worth pointing out that it costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead."

Dr. Weinstock goes even further. “Children should be allowed to go barefoot in the dirt, play in the dirt, and not have to wash their hands when they come in to eat,” he said. He and Dr. Elliott pointed out that children who grow up on farms and are frequently exposed to worms and other organisms from farm animals are much less likely to develop allergies and autoimmune diseases. .... Also helpful, he said, is to “let kids have two dogs and a cat,” which will expose them to intestinal worms that can promote a healthy immune system.

researchers are concluding that organisms like the millions of bacteria, viruses and especially worms that enter the body along with “dirt” spur the development of a healthy immune system.

Ask mothers why babies are constantly picking things up from the floor or ground and putting them in their mouths, and chances are they’ll say that it’s instinctive — that that’s how babies explore the world. But why the mouth, when sight, hearing, touch and even scent are far better at identifying things?

amidst the flames, NYT opens up a phoenix API.

The NY Times Developer Network. Looks like they have some really interesting API's to play with.

This API to search over 2.8 million NT Times articles back to 1981 looks incredible. Plus I really commend the Times for releasing this API. A valuable and useful resource indeed.

If you're not ready to expose everything about you to anyone who asks to be your online friend, it's time you learned how to use Facebook's friend lists.

How to keep stuff you want open open and stuff you want secret secret. Includes discussion of Facebook's own advice about it.

This is interesting because social networking is not just about staying in touch. We now selectively chose who to communicate with as well as who can communicate with us and how much they can know about us.

Handy way of skimming NYT.

And dead tree editions deliverd via petrol to au sub-urbian households...

RT @guykawasaki: NYT could give every subscriber a Kindle and save money. http://adjix.com/y4t4 [from http://twitter.com/jamesvandyke/statuses/1377816533]

Article on invention and inspiration. Design.

the work of inventor/author/cartoonist/former urban planner Steven M. Johnson

To illustrate how simple it can be, here’s an actual program that counts the browsing requests from each IP address. This is really all there is to it!

"... Such projects have required special knowledge and expertise. The Map/Reduce Toolkit (MRToolkit) aims to change this. It takes care of the details of setting up and running Hadoop jobs, and encapsulates most of the complexity of writing map and reduce steps. The toolkit, which is Ruby-based, provides the framework — you only have to supply the details of the map and reduce steps."

Package for making it easier to use mapreduce for batch processing, from NYTimes.

New York Times Photography, Video and Visual Journalism Blog

Lens is the photojournalism blog of The New York Times, presenting the finest and most interesting visual and multimedia reporting - photographs, videos and slide shows. A showcase for Times photographers, it also seeks to highlight the best work of other newspapers, magazines and news and picture agencies; in print, in books, in galleries, in museums and on the Web.

Facebook's rise to 200 million users, showing network diagrams and site expansion and use

infographic on growth of Facebook

Nice diagram from NY Times showing map of the world and changing age distribution of Facebook members over time.

Great data visualization for how the age and worldwide distribution of Facebook members has cahnged since launch in 2004

How to Save Newspapers (Or, Why the NYT Should Acquire Twitter) - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org http://ow.ly/42Jn [from http://twitter.com/sasii/statuses/1625479259]

There's nothing more timely than Twitter. Twitter would provide the NYT with four key resources and capabilities.

How to Save Newspapers (Or, Why the NYT Should Acquire Twitter) - HarvardBusiness.org http://bit.ly/zmw7p What will Maureen say? [from http://twitter.com/JEBworks/statuses/1598590889]

Why the NYT Should Acquire Twitter

artists illustrations from a visit to Monticello

an important piece on Thomas Jefferson

a visit to Thomas Jefferson's residence

One artist blogs about the impact visiting Monticello had on her and her impressions of Jefferson.

A nice article that discuses food regarding exercise

SUMMER may not be the best time to cook, but it’s certainly among the best times to eat. Toss watermelon and peaches with some ingredients you have lying around already, and you can produce a salad that’s delicious, unusual, fast and perfectly seasonal.

All manner of salads large and small. Dressing recipes too.

"I don’t really read the NYTImes beyond the technology section. But I’m guessing that the top performers in the news room, say the best 5%-10% of the writers and editors, produce 50% or more of the real value of the newspaper. The hungriest reporters. The best writers. The most competitive and aggressive editors."

Like everyone else I've watched the print media world fall apart over the last few years. The poster child for that industry is ...

Like everyone else I’ve watched the print media world fall apart over the last few years. The poster child for that industry is the New York Times, of course, and their many missteps in recent memory have been well chronicled. In early 2008 Marc Andreessen started a New York Times Deathwatch, and the company’s financial performance has degraded since then.

love this...amazing story about love and strength

"Let’s say you have what you believe to be a healthy marriage. You’re still friends and lovers after spending more than half of your lives together. […] Sure, you have your marital issues, but on the whole you feel so self-satisfied about how things have worked out that you would never, in your wildest nightmares, think you would hear these words from your husband one fine summer day: 'I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. I’m moving out. The kids will understand. They’ll want me to be happy.' But wait. This isn’t the divorce story you think it is. Neither is it a begging-him-to-stay story. It’s a story about hearing your husband say 'I don’t love you anymore' and deciding not to believe him. And what can happen as a result."

Series: The New York Times R&D Lab The New York Times envisions version 2.0 of the newspaper By Zachary M. Seward / May 11 / 9 a.m. The New York Times Co.’s research and development group has some of the best views in their midtown skyscraper — 24 floors above the newsrooms, higher even than the executives’ suites. Developers in the core R&D group — with titles like “lead creative technologist” and, my favorite, “futurist-in-residence” — are charged by the brass 14 floors below them with anticipating how news will next be consumed.

<<The New York Times, often lauded as one of the greatest producers of multimedia journalism, is inspirational not just because of the dazzling technologies that it uses to bring stories to life (Flash, databases, slideshows), but because of the selected stories themselves. While it has been said before on this site that there are a great many other news services creating amazing work, the Times remains a forerunner in the marriage of technology and journalism. Here are few of the Times' most impressive recent works:>>

10 inspirational features

The New York Times, often lauded as one of the greatest producers of multimedia journalism, is inspirational not just because of the dazzling technologies that it uses to bring stories to life (Flash, databases, slideshows), but because of the selected stories themselves. While it has been said before on this site that there are a great many other news services creating amazing work, the Times remains a forerunner in the marriage of technology and journalism.

Despite their reputation as early adopters, young people are not flocking to Twitter. But their parents are.

The public nature of Twitter is particularly sensitive for the under-18 set, whether because they want to hide what they are doing from their parents or, more often, because their parents restrict their interaction with strangers on the Web... Many young people use the Web not to keep up with the issues of the day but to form and express their identities, said Andrea Forte, who studied how high school students use social media for her dissertation. (She will be an assistant professor at Drexel University in the spring.)

"A list of 100 hotels, culled from readers' suggestions, that represent some of the best bargains for travelers headed to one of 14 European cities in the next few months."

A list of 100 hotels, culled from readers’ suggestions, that represent some of the best bargains for travelers headed to one of 14 European cities in the next few months.

Surely it's a struggle to teach thoughtfulness, but I love this.

Interesting! My favorite: "If a table is not ready within a reasonable length of time, offer a free drink and/or amuse-bouche. The guests may be tired and hungry and thirsty, and they did everything right"

reek from perfume or cigarettes. People want to smell the food and beverage. 37. Do not d

Stunning directory of NY Times visualisations

HOLY VISUALISATION BATMAN!

Oooh shiny

every NYT interactive project

really interesting interactive visualization of unemployment by race, gender, age, and education

Impresionante gráfica del NYTimes sobre el desempleo por grupos de población. Vía http://twitter.com/kikollan

Great infographic, great data

Unemployment rate data visualisation from NYTimes

Informative.

"Not all groups have felt the recession equally."

For the last 150 years, The New York Times has maintained one of the most authoritative news vocabularies ever developed. In 2009, we began to publish this vocabulary as linked open data. The Data The New York Times has published 5,000 people subject headings as linked open data under a CC BY license. We provide both RDF documents and a human-friendly HTML versions.

People subject headings for New York Times

data.nytimes.com For the last 150 years, The New York Times has maintained one of the most authoritative news vocabularies ever developed. In 2009, we began to publish this vocabulary as linked open data. The Data The New York Times has published 5,000 people subject headings as linked open data under a CC BY license. We provide both RDF documents and a human-friendly HTML versions.

The New York Times has published 5,000 people subject headings as linked open data under a CC BY license. We provide both RDF documents and a human-friendly HTML versions.

data.nytimes.com For the last 150 years, The New York Times has maintained one of the most authoritative news vocabularies ever developed. In 2009, we began to publish this vocabulary as linked open data. The Data The New York Times has published 5,000 people subject headings as linked open data under a CC BY license. We provide both RDF documents and a human-friendly HTML versions.

See how foreign-born groups settled in your area and across the United States from 1880 to 2000.

This is really pretty cool, particularly how the trends so visibly change over time.

Select a foreign-born group to see how they settled across the United States.

Bamboozling Ourselves (Part 1)

"To be sure, the Van Meegeren story raises many, many questions. Among them: what makes a work of art great? Is it the signature of (or attribution to) an acknowledged master? Is it just a name? Or is it a name implying a provenance? With a photograph we may be interested in the photographer but also in what the photograph is of. With a painting this is often turned around, we may be interested in what the painting is of, but we are primarily interested in the question: who made it? Who held a brush to canvas and painted it? Whether it is the work of an acclaimed master like Vermeer or a duplicitous forger like Van Meegeren — we want to know more."

Han van Meegeren

Long OpEd piece on a fake Vermeer and Nazi ties in Amsterdam

Adobe Air based news reader from the New York Times.

Welcome to the future. Your newspaper is here.

Lector online de The New York Times para Adobe Air

We asked several experts to explain the roots of this shift, and how it might affect the future course of the written language.

Really liked this. There's a lot more going than most realize.

"Not that long ago, I was at a conference at Yale and looked at the sea of open laptops in the seats in front of me. So why wasn’t my laptop open? Because I follow people on Twitter who serve as my Web-crawling proxies, each of them tweeting links that I could examine and read on a Blackberry. Regardless of where I am, I surf far less than I used to."

Like many newbies on Twitter, I vastly overestimated the importance of broadcasting on Twitter and after a while, I realized that I was not Moses and neither Twitter nor its users were wondering what I thought. Nearly a year in, I’ve come to understand that the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.

I can remember when I first thought seriously about Twitter. Last March, I was at the SXSW conference, a conclave in Austin, Tex., where technology, media and music are mashed up and re-imagined, and, not so coincidentally, where Twitter first rolled out in 2007. As someone who was oversubscribed on Facebook, overwhelmed by the computer-generated RSS feeds of news that came flying at me, and swamped by incoming e-mail messages, the last thing I wanted was one more Web-borne intrusion into my life.

article on twitter

So you’re drowning in a sea of information. Perhaps the answer is more information.

Tips on credit cards AND travel insurance

Suggests getting a Capital One card.

But why pay any fees at all? To keep from handing banks money unnecessarily (isn’t the bailout enough?), I also keep a money market account at Capital One Direct Banking, which charges nothing (and earns me No Hassle rewards points). I linked this Capital One online account to transfer money regularly from my Bank of America account. The transfers can take awhile — up to a week — so I always make sure to get that under way well in advance.

v

Examine maps of Netflix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities across the nation.

Visual depiction of datamining Netflix queues by New York City districts.

#infografico Os filmes mais alugados na Netflix de acordo com o CEP em 12 cidades dos EUA http://bit.ly/6yQ7LD /by NYTimes.com

Netflix queues by location. Interesting, although only for certain areas (I find it cool cause I can look around Seattle).

r La Motta, rage is the defau

shane + groundhog day...

I'm intrigued by these choices from Stanley Fish, mostly because the only one I've seen is Vertigo.

NYT’s Tom Friedman says it best: “At some point we gotta charge for our product.”

New York Magazine Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fnymag.com%2Fdaily%2Fintel%2F2010%2F01%2Fnew_york_times_set_to_mimic_ws.html

El NYT, a punto de implantar un modelo de pago en la web.

New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. appears close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of sometimes fraught debate inside the paper, the choice for some time has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system.

travel

In this beguiling Pacific Northwest city of artisanal cafes, offbeat museums, funky neighborhoods and food carts from every corner of the world, the good life comes cheap.

njjj

At Google’s 10th anniversary of Blogger event on Tuesday, I was surprised how many of the blogging experts in the room were unaware of the broad and deep adoption of blogging tools at The New York Times, one of my several freelance employers. So with the help of the Times’ Technology section editor, Damon Darlin, I whipped up an insidery look at how the NYT uses WordPress to crank out hundreds of posts per day.

In many ways, the Times’ blogs are no different from anyone else’s. But there’s one organizational trick they employ very effectively: Division of Labor. Times bloggers don’t work on their own. They don’t handle every aspect of their blogs. Who does what is divided up to bring specific expertise to bear on different parts of each post. The result is I can crank out more posts, and those posts are better overall, than if we writers did everything ourselves. I know, not everyone wants to have other people involved in their blogging. But there’s a reason people work in teams.

Times deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman still considers the front page of the printed newspaper a sacred space, a place where editors and reporters display their best work and uphold the tradition of The Times’ quality reporting.

By most counts, New York Times deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman still considers the front page of the printed newspaper a sacred space, a place where editors and reporters display their best work and uphold the tradition of The Times’ quality reporting. “The front page is still a front page; there’s still six stories there, and they are what they are,” Mr. Landman told The Observer. “They occupy the same positions that they always have. If they are influential or not influential, it’s for the same reasons, right?”

The New York Times did just that this afternoon when it announced that it has released a new Application Programming Interface (API) offering every article the paper has written since 1981, 2.8 million articles. The API includes 28 searchable fields and updated content every hour.

The New York Times announced that it has released a new Application Programming Interface (API) offering every article the paper has written since 1981, 2.8 million articles. The API includes 28 searchable fields and updated content every hour.

Sección de widgets para permitir que otras páginas distribuyan sus contenidos

Shit, i guess i _have_ to do the c25k now.

Phys Ed: Can Running Actually Help Your Knees?

The Wallstreet mindset that allowed the Madoff scandal to happen, and how to fix it.

Required reading, Part I.

OUR financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense... The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest.

financial crisis

** Posted using Viigo: Mobile RSS, Sports, Current Events and more **

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors. In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

Our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.” Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization.

Research and publication has become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages faculty members to cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

Christoph Niemann

Common phrases and phenomena represented as Google maps.

NYTimes: My Way - Creative Google Map Art http://nyti.ms/anvGEw #creative #googlemaps

variant suggestions

great as written but do not need that much butter on the bottom

# 4 tablespoons butter, olive oil, lard or bacon drippings # 1 1/2 cups medium-grind cornmeal # 1/2 cup all-purpose flour # 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder # 1 teaspoon salt # 1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar # 2 eggs # 1 1/4 cups milk, more if needed

Used ~1 T bacon fat in pan; 2-3 T sugar, 2 eggs, 1 c thawed frozen corn. Pretty good. The bacon flavor was good - could have used more. Could also have been a bit sweeter, for me. Audrey didn't like the corn kernels, but Gautam did.

stanley fish's favorites. great set of classics. re-live your introduction to film class here.

Stuff to netflix in the New Year. Along with the Wire, Season 2 of Mad Men, Going Home, and Thunder Road.

test 1

Presidential Elections - [Exit Poll Data][

Quinoa

We'll see how long that lasts.

New York Times is thinking about two plans to charge of their online content: a "meter system" or a "membership" system. Decision probably will made end of June 2009.

Reports are The New York Times is considering two different ways to charge for online content

The New York Times hires Jennifer Preston as its first social media editor.

RT @davewiner: NYTimes Appoints First Social Media Editor. http://tr.im/mscX [from http://twitter.com/writelife/statuses/1925869553]

NY Times appoints 1ST Social Media Editor (YET NO ONE KNOWS ANYTHING ABOUT HER) http://bit.ly/lCnPr VIA @jakrose [from http://twitter.com/markivey/statuses/1926725588]

RT @mattsingley: NYTimes has hired a Social Media Editor. That's a big move for SMO http://bit.ly/dVb4o [from http://twitter.com/ErikNYC/statuses/1928717412]

RT @lebrun @jowyang: Mainstream Media Gets More Social: NYT appoints social media editor http://bit.ly/zDxlB [from http://twitter.com/axbom/statuses/1933777521]

"Jennifer Preston has been appointed the first Social Media Editor of the New York Times. ... Little is known about Preston's personal use of social media, she's either using aliases or is remarkably quiet around the web, and details are still forthcoming about the new position she'll fill."

Genial RT @kicoes: Hay que hacer un máster. RT @martimanent: Representación visual de la privacidad en Facebook http://tinyurl.com/2umddlb

Buy American. I Am.

Interactive visualization from the NY Times

enter a word - track reader responses over time

The word train on the financial crisis

Twitter Passes NYT, WSJ in Unique Visitors - ReadWriteWeb http://ow.ly/6qOu [from http://twitter.com/10minuteexpert/statuses/1773547846]

RWW: Twitter Passes NYT, WSJ in Unique Visitors http://bit.ly/kbSIM [from http://twitter.com/WayneNH/statuses/1784737289]

5/11/09

best travel web sites

Could there be a more thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women?

"But shouldn’t a woman who is prepared to be commander in chief be intimidating? Because of the intelligence, experience, talent and drive that got her there? If she isn’t, at least on some level, off-putting, if her presence inspires national commentary on breast-pumping and babysitting rather than health care reform and social security, then something is seriously wrong. If she doesn’t elicit at least some degree of awe, then something is missing."

“This election is not about issues,” Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager said this week. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” That’s a scary thought. For the takeaway is so often base, a reflection more of people’s fears and insecurities than of our hopes and dreams.

Updated: http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/10/new-york-times-tweet/

RT @romenesko NYT tells staff: "Tweet" has yet to achieve the status of standard English -- so don't use it. http://is.gd/cK7JX – Steve Rubel (steverubel) http://twitter.com/steverubel/statuses/15850485557

Phil Corbett, the latest standards editor at the Times (maybe the greatest job in the world?), has issued a proclamation! Yesterday, the following memo went

'New York Times' Bans the Word 'Tweet'

Ceci n'est pas une tweet. http://slate.me/breHfL The treachery of editorial standards, via @stevesilberman @hangingnoodles [from http://twitter.com/CircleReader/statuses/15857259604]

Phil Corbett, the latest standards editor at the Times (maybe the greatest job in the world?), has issued a proclamation! Yesterday, the following memo went out, asking writers to abstain from the invented past-tense and other weird iterations of the magical noun-verb "Twitter." His case isn't terrible, actually—and he offers this terrifying vision: "Someday, 'tweet' may be as common as 'e-mail.'" Oh dear. Well, read for yourself and decide.

'New York Times' Bans the Word 'Tweet' http://www.theawl.com/2010/06/new-york-times-bans-the-word-tweet – coryhaik (coryhaik) http://twitter.com/coryhaik/statuses/16169371772

New York Times Bans the word 'tweet' - out of spite? http://bit.ly/ah1f12 #NYT /via @hectorlima – naomi covacs (laconics) http://twitter.com/laconics/statuses/15928417052

'New York Times' Bans the Word 'Tweet' - The Awl http://bit.ly/aJB49T